Oh look another bigoted fool who can't read, and she is not white for once. Well I will be damned miracles do happen. The Japanese have no issues with the US presence in the land of the rising sun. If they did they would have renegotiated the treaty the signed at the end of WW2, like they've been able to do for the last 50 fucking years.

The Diet isn't lacking balls it just realises the will of the general Japanese public.

Oh look another bigoted fool who can't read, and she is not white for once. Well I will be damned miracles do happen. The Japanese have no issues with the US presence in the land of the rising sun. If they did they would have renegotiated the treaty the signed at the end of WW2, like they've been able to do for the last 50 fucking years.

The Diet isn't lacking balls it just realises the will of the general Japanese public.

America has 7,800 hectares of Okinawan land and gave back 4,000 of it so they could build helipads on the rest.

The people living right next to that land are going "but we live here and that's going to be noisy and suck."

Nobody wants the US out of Japan. They just want not to have noisy helipads next to their house.

The PM is quite accurately identifying that the people protesting this deal are a tiny little minority, nobody else really gives a shit, and agreeing to the deal is good for Japanese-American foreign relations - even if the helipads never get built, because the protesting residents keep it tied up in courtroom battles and PR negotiations.

The PM cannot himself go support the protest, because it would be seen as an anti-American political statement, but it is good for the government to make a show of solidarity with the residents so they don't feel like Japan has put American military interests ahead of the Japanese people.

It's a long game, really. It will ultimately play out in one of three ways.

1. The Japanese government negotiates a change in the deal so the helipads will not get built.

2. The residents lose their standing to protest, the helipads get built, and there's nothing they can do about it.

3. The American government voluntarily abandons the helipad deal and conducts some other permissible activity on the land.

No matter how this ends up resolved, it will probably take decades. Governments don't look at time and money the same way people do. Especially young people.